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KELLY, R.C., 1977. Etoro Social Structure: a Study in Structural Contradiction. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press.

LANDTMAN, G., 1927. The Kiwai Papuans of British New Guinea: a Nature-born Instance o f Rousseau’s Ideal Community. London, Macmillan.

LÊVI-STRAUSS, C., 1987. Anthropology and Myth: Lectures, 1951-1982. Translated by Roy Willis. Oxford and New York, Basil Blackwood.

McKINLEY, R.H., 1971. Why do Crow and Omaha Kinship Terminologies Exist? A Sociology of Knowledge Interpretation. Man (n.s.) 6(3):408-26.

MEAD, G.H., 1938. The Philosophy of the Act. Edited by C.W. Morris. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press.

RYAN, D.J., 1955. Clan Organisation in the Mendi Valley, Southern Highlands of Papua-New Guinea. Oceania, 26:79-90.

SAHLINS, M.D., 1958. Social Stratification in Polynesia. Monograph of the American Ethnological Society. Seattle, University of Washington Press.

----------- , 1976. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.----------- , 1985. Islands of History. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press.SCHIEFFELIN, E.L., 1976. The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers. New York, St. Martin’s Press.SCHUTZ, A., 1962. On Multiple Realities, in M. Natanson (ed.), Collected Papers, vol.I: The Problem of Social

Reality. The Hague, Nijhoff. pp.207-59.----------- , 1964. Don Quixote and the Problem of Reality, in A. Brodersen (ed.), Collected Papers, vol.II: Studies in

Social Theory. The Hague, Nijhoff. pp. 135-58.VAYDA, A.P., 1966. Diversity and Uniformity in New Guinea Cultures. Acta Ethnographica Academiae Scientiarum

Hungaricae, 15:293-300.WILLIAMS, F.E., 1941. Natives of Lake Kutubu, Papua. Oceania Monographs No. 6. Sydney, Australian National

Research Council.

COCKATOO, HORNBILL, KINGFISHER

Steven Feld University of Texas at Austin

When I asked to hear some Kaluli1 stories the first one Kulu told me was about three familiar birds; amo (Sulphur-crested cockatoo, Cacatua galerita), obei (Papuan hombill, Aceros plicatus), and kuma (Hook-billed kingfisher, M elidora macrorhina). The way Kulu told it, obei the hombill once went swimming with his friends amo the cockatoo and kuma the kingfisher. At the creek they took off their feathers, placed them by the bank, and went to play in the water. Later, leaving the water before his friends, the hombill replaced his dark body and wing feathers at the bank, and then paused. His tail feathers too were all black, but just next to them were the beautiful white tail feathers that belonged to the cockatoo. Coveting their whiteness, the hombill dressed his tail with the long white plumes and quickly flew off to the treetops.As soon as they got out of the water, the cockatoo and kingfisher realised the hombill’s trick. Amo cried out in sadness, and proclaimed that wearing no tail feathers was surely better than wearing the dark ones the hombill had left behind. Feeling sorrow over the loss suffered by his friend, the little kingfisher determined to seek retribution on the cockatoo’s behalf, and flew off to the hombill’s treehouse. “I’ve come to get those tail feathers back,” said the kingfisher, as the hombill’s long beak poked out of his treehole. To which came the curt reply: “I’m not willing to give them up!” Enraged at the refusal, the kingfisher unexpectedly lunged forward, grasping the uppermost part of the hombill’s beak in his own. As the hombill struggled and twisted his neck to withdraw, the kingfisher incised a thick deep ridge onto the huge beak. And then, as the hombill kept jerking his head backward in pain, more ridges were cut, one beneath the other so that there were several gashes in his casque by the time he escaped back into his treehouse.

Returning afterwards to the cockatoo’s house, the kingfisher reported that he had inflicted the ugly scars on the hombill. In return, the cockatoo gave him a small tuft of soft white feathers for his own neck, to be worn like a kina pearl shell necklace.

As a novice fieldworker, my first impression of this story was in terms of Edward L. Schieffelin’s ethnographic exposition of the role of reciprocity in Kaluli behavioural style (1976, see also E.L. Schieffelin 1980). There he points out that the Kaluli sense of reciprocity is tied to the concept of wel, meaning an ‘exchange of exact equivalents’. The customary pattern of marriage, ga w d , is literally an exchange of exact

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equivalents in women: two men exchange their sisters as brides. Yet anger, no less than hospitality, also involves a social transaction; like gifts, injuries may involve repayment in equal proportion. Since exchanges cannot always be constituted from exact equivalents, a sense of balanced compensation, or su, is sometimes enacted more readily than wel. The kingfisher’s attack on the hombill is not really su because su generally involves some sort of wealth compensation, not retaliation. The retaliation might more likely be called wel because it involves one injury for another, even though it is not an exactly equivalent injury. In any case, by Kaluli standards, it seems that the kingfisher had evened the score.

As time went by I learned that equally important among Kaluli sentiments are emotions of feeling owed for having suffered a loss, as well as feeling sorrow for another who has suffered one. For instance, one day a man from a distant village stopped to see me on his way to another longhouse community. On my porch he greeted me warmly, then suddenly switched demeanour, from exuberant to downcast and low key. “This morning, on my very way here to see you I stopped to gather crayfish to trade for salt. I have no salt. But the water was high and I got none.” In effect, he was feeling owed, and wanted my empathy; his behaviour was a direct shorthand for saying “feel sorry and give me salt!”, and I did. In the same way, the cockatoo’s loss made the kingfisher feel sorry and act on his behalf. The return of a gift (the white feather kina necklace) was a friendly way to reciprocate the kingfisher’s action, itself a payback for the original transgression. In this sense, the story involves two turns of Kaluli reciprocity, realised through the practice of compensation and the concomitant sentiments of obligation.

At a more grand level, the entire story, like others I was beginning to hear, seemed to operate as a reflection, where bird actions mirror human social affairs, playing out the basic Kaluli scenarios of sorrow, loss, compensation, and exchange. But as time went on I began to sense that the actual content of the story could be more significant.

Part of that sense came from developing a greater familiarity with Kaluli activities directly relevant to these stories. For example, observing Kaluli ceremonial costuming, it is clear that white is a sign of beauty, and Kaluli male dancers make themselves beautiful by wearing white feathers in their dance headdresses, as well as their arm and leg bands. Besides the feathers of the cockatoo and hombill, the only other source of white plumes in Bosavi is from sego, the Plumed egret (Egretta intermedia), whose presence is sporadic. And although the cockatoo’s crest plumes are worn as ear decorations, and a local variety of pale yellow cucumber is called “amo cucumber”, it is really for whiteness that the cockatoo stands out. Mothers leave a child’s first tooth in the bush for amo in order to insure the whiteness of all subsequent teeth.

It turns out that the cockatoo’s whiteness and beauty are also bound up with Kaluli ideas of femininity. The cockatoo is always characterised as a woman, and the secondary name, ea , an onomatopoeic imitation of the call, is a common woman’s name. A m o's voice quality, a grating, arching squawk, is also tied to the image of Kaluli women as strong of voice and quick to scold or react with a sharp screech. In another story halina, the Palm cockatoo (Probosciger aterrimus), makes a speech telling the other parrots that they are eating too much tree fruit. When his speech is finished amo scolds him for being the biggest fruit thief of them all, thus shaming him in front of the other parrots. Strength of voice is also part of the basis of the taboo on eating amo\ Kaluli say that eating strong substances may cut their lives short.

More female links come out when Kaluli speak bale to , ‘turned over words’; these are words that hide, multiply, or substitute literal meanings. Here the use of the cockatoo’s name amo refers to a cranky or whiny old woman; the name also can be used as a substitute for the kin term meaning ‘grandmother’. This is also the image of the white cockatoo that is invoked when people speak of birds as ane mama, ‘gone reflections’; after death an elder woman’s spirit manifestation ‘shows through’ into the visible as an amo.

Amo is also linked to other female birds through aspects of ceremonial costuming, where men appropriate natural signs of female beauty to beautify themselves. The cassowaries uluwa (Casuarius casuarius) and more commonly guSuwa (Casuarius bennetti) provide black feathers for dance headdresses. And the red plumes of d o n , the Raggiana bird of paradise (Paradisaea raggiana) are worn in arm bands, just above the elbows, so that they flap as the dancer bobs up and down along the longhouse floor. Black and red complement white in the basic Kaluli colour triangle.

Like a m o , Kaluli consider cassowaries and birds of paradise as prominent female images, and the relationship of the two originates in another story. One time aIon and guSuwa went to the bush together, while guSuwa was sleeping don stole some of its fluffy black feathers. On the way home don stopped for a meal of pandanus (marita fruit) and by eating sloppily and hastily, stained all the new feathers a deep bright red. Thus don and guSuwa have different colours but the same silky texture to their feathers.

Married women in Bosavi wear jow a, a cinnamon coloured skirt while younger or unmarried women wear ken, a lighter skirt of stiffer material. Jowa are linked to don, whose fluffy red flank plumes are called don jowa', the stiffer cassowary plumes are compared to ken. Indeed, the term guSuwa can be used as bale to when speaking of young women; the connotation is to the similar bumping and swaying motion of the cassowary

Cockatoo, Hornbill, Kingfisher 209

Figure 1. Amo, Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita)

and women’s skirts and rear ends. Young men who are homy report dreaming about hunting cassowaries. And in the world of ‘gone reflections’, spirits of young women frequently appear as cassowaries, while those of mothers appear as don.2 The two thus complement amo, the spirit reflection of older women.

Returning to female voice quality, amo and don link up again. Zoologically, brightly plumed birds of paradise with elaborate tail feathers and loud display calls are males; females have duller plumage. Although Kaluli are generally adept at assessing the sexual dimorphism of birds, they systematically reverse the facts of sexual dimorphism for the species of birds of paradise they know, often applying distinct names to the males and females (Feld 1982:243) and insisting that the brightly plumed ones are the females either because they wear and display bright skirts or capes like don (or the King, Magnificent, or Superb birds of paradise) or, like amo, have loud (sometimes read as seductive, or at least enticing) voices.

210 Steven Feld

Figure 2. Obei, Papuan hombill (Aceros plicatus)

The hombill, on the other hand, is thoroughly male in his attributes. Both the names obei and the alternate names odola and odo are common men’s names. When young women say, ‘that obei has a long nose’ they are speaking in ‘turned over words’ to say, “that guy is really good looking”. As older women generally appear in the spirit reflection realm as cockatoos, their male counterparts appear as hombills.

A popular heyalo song I heard opens with these lyrics:

obei yabo (3x) an obei is comingSuldniga misiyalo (3x) from Sukiniga mountaindonalefo keleyesu diogube (3x) will he steal dona (magnolia) treefruit?

In successive repetitions the first line remains the same, and the second and third change the name of mountain and tree type, thus creating a map of a path the bird might take, eating from trees along the road. By singing of an obei coming and eating tree fruit one discusses, in ‘turned over words’, the spirits of men, questions the road they have taken, and their presence in nearby trees and lands. And when voices of dead

Cockatoo, Hornbill, Kingfisher 211

come up and speak through the mouths of mediums in Kaluli spirit seances, male spirits may be introduced with the breathy ha ha ha ha ha voice of the hornbill; female spirits will be introduced with the grating wa hooo or eaaa calls of birds of paradise or cockatoos.

The contrast between the cockatoo and hornbill then weaves through the intertwined realms of Kaluli colour, beauty, and gender. Amo personifies feminine beauty with whiteness, and feminine intensity with strength and voice. O bei personifies the male quest for beauty; as he wears white in his tail, so men wear white feathers in their costume to make themselves provocative (along with red and black feathers from birds of paradise and cassowaries, equally female spirit birds). And if the contrast seems thorough, kuma the kingfisher is the perfect mediator and foil for this oppositional dramatis personae. Dull and nondescript, more often heard than seen, this little bird stands out solely for its nocturnal whistle.

As layers of this story became embedded in this deeper ethnographic and natural historical perspective, it was clear that the whole was more than a transparent reflection of behavioural routines. I began to think of the story as a vehicle for displaying crystallisations of Kaluli symbols, sentiments, and social categories, played out by birds as mediators and metaphors. While hardly surprised that such stories chartered social realities, I was nonetheless thoroughly entertained by the particulars of the clever yet subtle correspondences between the human and bird attributes involved.

Yet a third twist on my perception of this story’s clever construction was entirely unanticipated. Over a period of several months I began working closely on issues of Kaluli natural history with Jubi, whose detailed knowledge of the nesting, breeding, feeding, courting, and calling behaviour of some one hundred and fifty species of local birds was truly exceptional, and a great stimulus to my own curiosity. Finding his abilities as a naturalist to be so exacting, I asked Jubi to tell me this story I thought I knew so well, and to give me his thoughts on it. While his telling was virtually identical to versions I had previously heard - Kaluli do not tend to elaborate greatly when telling these short tales - Jubi’s way of explicating the story stuck closely to ornithological issues like the ones we had been discussing; he posed these to me as a series of questions:

“Why does amo have short tail feathers when the others in his family, halina (Palm cockatoo, Probosciger aterrim us) and hagabi (Pesquet’s parrot, Psittrichas fu lgidus), who are equal in body size have long tail feathers?” The observation was quite accurate: all three birds are about 50 mm in size, yet the tail feathers of the Palm cockatoo and Pesquet’s parrot average 30 mm longer than those of the Sulphur-crested cockatoo. Coincidentally, the tail plumes of the hornbill are about the same length as the former two birds’!

“Why does kuma have a hook in his bill when the others in his family, wsm is (Azure kingfisher, Ceyx azureus, and Little kingfisher, Ceyx pusillus), mono (Sacred kingfisher, Halcyon sancta), soga (Rufous- bellied kingfisher, Dacelo gaud.icha.udi), and sololobe (Lesser yellow-billed kingfisher, Halcyon torotoro) all have straight pointed bills?” And he added, “w sm is, mono, soga and sdoldbe are all very different, with yellow, white, and red feathers; kuma’s feathers are all dark, but he has just a little white on his neck.” Again the observation was quite accurate; compared with the other kingfishers known to Kaluli, kuma is notably unusual.

Finally Jubi came to the hornbill: “This bird is very different; no other bird has cuts on his nose and no other bird is dark all over the body with white just in the tail. Where did he get those tail feathers? Obei is really different.”

Without saying as much, Jubi was indicating that the answers to these natural historical peculiarities are worked out by the story. Amo the white cockatoo is different from other cockatoos and parrots because obei the hornbill stole his long tail feathers and only left him with a set of shorter ones. Kuma the kingfisher is different from other kingfishers because he twisted a hook in his bill while paying back obei for that theft. For this act amo exchanged a token of whiteness to make up for the kingfisher’s otherwise dull colouring. And obei wears both his stolen prize, those beautiful white tail feathers, and the mark of his punishment, a set of ridged scars on his beak.

Jubi added, “We know these three well; they are not shy. Amo and obei live in high treeholes; when they are young they are very docile and make good pets, and will eat from your hand. Kuma calls at night but we see him in daytime; he comes to the ground and will not run away from people. He knows we are friends because he helped amo\ none of the others in his family will come near to us. Kuma eats on the ground; he gets mud caked in the hook of his bill.” When I asked further about obei, he said: “Obei knows that amo is the most beautiful and has the strongest voice. Amo go through the treetops in flocks screaming ea ea ea eaal Their whiteness stands out in the treeline like little clouds that have stopped there. Obei also fly in big groups but their voices are not loud like women’s; we just hear the loud bobo bobo bobo of their wings beating.” Jubi’s comments made it clear that my bias toward symbolic (and presumably “deeper”) readings of the story backgrounded ways the tale highlights what Kaluli perceive as discontinuities in nature. As much as anything else, the story then emerged to me yet another way: as a Kaluli meditation on how natural curiosities, while much appreciated for their zoological subtleties, can equally constitute remarkable cultural puzzles. It also made me realise why stories need not carry much in the way of singular, specific meanings, either to

212 Steven Feld

Figure 3. Kuma, Hook-billed Kingfisher, M elidora macrorhina

locals or to ethnographers. That they are differentially perceived implicates not only how knowledge of and about them is stratified, but also how the very character of interpretation involves the active needs of the interpreter.

* * *

Most of these words were originally written in 1978 after my first period of fieldwork with the Kaluli. Reading back over this now it seems that the three successive levels of appreciation and discovery spoken of run parallel to three kinds of insight about the anthropology of natural history systematically integrated in Ralph Bulmer’s work. The transparent level is coordinative; natural history and culture intersect as thematic reflections, organised like stories with core motifs. The symbolic level is embedded; natural history in culture involves metaphoric enactments manifest through various realms of human experience and practice. The iconic level is interpenetrated; natural history as culture implicates how the implementation of reality and the imagination that we call culture is naturalised, and not apart from nature.

When Ralph read an early version of this he responded, as he had so generously to regular pleas for help from the field, with the gentle insistence that I attempt to determine more completely what Kaluli know about their world, and how that knowledge is complexly situated in personal and social experience and utility. His own work still represents the most mature attempt to date to do precisely this, to reconcile nature and culture by demonstrating the magnitude of natural history as a cultural system. Nature here is neither the residual facts of a brute empirical cultural ecology landscape, nor the mere stuff that appears on the far side of a structuralist’s colon and double colon of culture/nature equations. Rather, nature is potentially every bit as culturalised and culturally salient as ideology, politics, cosmology, or poetics.

Like Ralph, Jubi and other Kaluli attempted to guide me through the forest of creatures and symbols in a way that could position knowledge, whether fragmentary or systematic, in a simultaneously empirical- zoological and cultural-interpretive field. Reviewing the layers of complexity in the cockatoo, hombill, and kingfisher story I now see more clearly just how expansive Ralph’s vision of natural history as culture becomes, integrating ways behavioural expectations and ruptures in a story about birds stimulates reflection on why and how humans behave, how that behaviour relates to the symbolism of gender, beauty, voice, costume, and spirit representation, and how all of this is thoroughly nested in the natural historical realities that position each of these birds and their zoological families in Kaluli perceptions of natural discontinuities.

Cockatoo, H ombill, Kingfisher 213

Ralph’s seminal insight here, that understanding the bricolage of la pensde sauvage requires ethnographers and linguists to be more thorough and inquisitive natural historians, remains an essential challenge that will not quit or be supplanted by rigorous or flashy structural, ethnosemantic, or symbolicAnterpretive analyses. Discovering and appreciating local knowledge of natural order, and how that knowledge implements social realities, is still a great frontier of collaboration and interpretation that will undoubtedly revise and reevaluate much cultural analysis.4

NOTES

1. The Kaluli are a small (c. 1200) group of swidden horticulturalists living in the Great Papuan Plateau area of the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. My fieldwork among them in 1976-77, 1982 and 1984 was generously sponsored by the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the American Philosophical Society. The major report from this work is Feld (1990); see especially chapter 2, “To you they are birds, to me they are voices in the forest”, for a more general discussion of Kaluli ethno-omithology and bird symbolism. Basic Kaluli ethnography can be found in E.L. Schieffelin (1976), B.B. Schieffelin (1990).

2. An additional dimension of the female/cassowary linkage is found in Kaluli cosmology. Kaluli consider part of the unseen world to be populated by mysteriously powerful mamul people who live remotely on Mt Bosavi, and are known to Kaluli by their ceremonies, which show through dramatically into the visible by materialising as the thunder and lightning of mountain storms. Unlike other reflections in the unseen, mamul appear in the Kaluli world as wild pigs (male form) and cassowaries (female form). Kaluli spirit reflections roam on mamul grounds in the unseen, while wild pigs and cassowaries roaming Kaluli grounds in the visible are often reflections of the mamul (see E.L. Schieffelin 1976:100-1).

3. Although Kaluli are quite aware of the zoological facts of sexual dimorphism of the hornbill, they tend to conveniently ignore the distinctions between the male, female and immature appearances in the symbolic realm. This is in quite marked distinction to the engendered treatment of the birds of paradise.

4. For helpful critiques and responses to various drafts over the last ten years I am grateful to Ralph Bulmer, Jared Diamond, Chris Healey, Bill Peckover, Bambi B. Schieffelin, and Edward L. Schieffelin. The illustrations of the cockatoo, hombill, and kingfisher are by Mary Groff.

REFERENCES

FELD, Steven, 1990. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. (2nd Edn; 1st 1982.)

SCHIEFFELIN, Bambi B., 1990. The Give and Take of Everyday Life: Language Socialization of Kaluli Children.. Cambridge University Press.

SCHIEFFELIN, Edward L., 1976. The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

----------- , 1980. Reciprocity and Construction of Reality. Man, 15:502-17.

A DARWINIST MANIFESTO

Robin Fox Rutgers University

Ralph Bulmer was Distinguished Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers for a year. It was all too short a time. He brought to students and faculty alike a breath of fresh air that stirred in us many new thoughts and ideas. These have surfaced in some strange ways. As a symbolic anthropologist he forced me to defend my contention that ultimately, in anthropology, all explanation had to be evolutionary. This I was very willing to do since it was always this symbolic activity that was quoted against me as somehow removing Man from evolutionary explanation. I’m not sure he was ever convinced, but he was a sympathetic critic, and things that I am proud of, like my article on “The Passionate Mind: Brains, Dreams, Evolution and Social Categories” (Zygon, 1986), Chapter Seven of The Red Lamp o f Incest (1983) - “The Matter of Mind”, and “Kinship Categories as Natural Categories” (in Chagnon and Irons (eds) 1979) are end products of these ruminations. I would have liked to produce a similar piece here (for example, an assessment of Putnam’s theories of “internal realism” and Lakoff’s of “embedded conceptual categories”, or an extension of my work with Jacques Mehler 'm Neonate Cognition, 1985), if only to show how philosophers and cognitive scientists are moving in the